A Life In Twenty Years
by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod
Summary: Kasumi is Neal's daughter, and she fits the emotions and experience of a life into her first twenty years. Twenty Years: Part I.


**A/N:** Now, to most, Neal's half-Yamani lady-knight wunder-daughter is a cause for serious concern. To me, she forms part of the world's largest plotbunny.

**Dedication:** To Ana, marooned in Japan, may you not get too homesick.

**Disclaimer:** This is a tiny bit complicated. The Tortallverse and concept of Neal's Lady Knight daughter belong to Tammy, but **_the twenty years format belongs to yours truly, as does Kasumi as represented in this fic._**

**0**

When Kasumi was born, her mother and father were more than delighted. For a while their life revolved around only her as their much-loved daughter, and the only child they would ever have, for reasons that were whispered behind closed doors when the half-Yamani baby with muddy hazel eyes was fast asleep. Her smiles lit up Queenscove, the sunny child who never seemed to mind.

**5**

When Kasumi was five years old her father died. For a long time, Kasumi only understood part of the finality of her father's death, let alone the little things- a fragment of Lady Alanna barking at someone caught on the wind, dreadful poetry on carefully preserved paper, emeralds that Yuki no longer wore –that made her mother's eyes fill with tears. But she still wasn't really surprised when her mother died and she went to live with her Auntie Kel, although she cried herself to sleep for many nights.

**10**

When Kasumi was ten years old, she had already made her choices and she stood firm against those who tried to persuade her that she shouldn't. Sunny Kasumi who never seemed to mind had a will of her own, as stubborn as her father, as gentle as her mother, as fair as her adoptive aunt and as singleminded as more Queenscoves and noh Daiomorus than either side of the family cared to count. As a consequence, when she decided something, she decided something, and though she might have to move heaven and earth to do it she would do it. At least the people she cared for weren't trying to stop her becoming a page, then a squire, and hopefully- a Lady Knight.

**15**

When she was fifteen years old, Kasumi had a difficult year. She was a squire, and five years closer to her goal. She was brave, proven, and more than half-way decent with a sword. But she was mostly quiet, when she spoke up she did so generally out of flashes of fierce anger she had yet to control, and although she avoided tilting she had had to answer challenges that had exploited her weakness. Sir Owen still believed in her, so did Lord Padraig and her Auntie Kel. However, there were many who did not, and Kasumi spent her fifteenth year trying to keep her temper under rigid control when she heard the jibes, the sarcasm and the taunts that followed her, and trying not to allow the retorts that leapt to her mind to leap further. She got into much trouble, and wished that she had not been blessed with an acute sense of hearing.

**20**

When she was twenty years old, she was an adult in her own, indisputable right. She still worked, and worked hard- she refused to leave a task totally unfinished. And yet the temper that so plagued her aged fifteen was not completely subdued. People who remembered Sir Nealan of Queenscove well blinked and wondered if the acid voice they heard around the corner was truly Kasumi, or perhaps Neal's ghost, come back to see his daughter at her best. Even as she was the image of her mother, her father's spirit ricocheted off the walls that Kasumi put up around it. She itched to do something, bursting with energy, sarcasm and ever-shorter temper as she practiced moves and patterns and katas that had been ingrained into her brain long since. Eventually, she gave up on Tortall for the duration. She asked permission from the ageing King Jonathan, got her adoptive aunt's blessing, informed everyone who mattered and started a long trail of traveling that didn't bring her back to Corus until she was twenty-five.


End file.
